Sermon
Service of Remembrance
Daniel F. Sullivan - May 31, 2009
Months ago Kathleen Buckley and I sat down to look through the list of graduates from my Class of 1965 to identify a minister we might be able to get to give the sermon for this Service of Remembrance at my last class reunion as president. We tried several whom I won’t name, but all had conflicts. So Kathleen said “why don’t you do it?” I said I don’t do sermons. But if you know Kathleen you know that she is nothing if not persuasive. Things happen that you have resisted right up until the last—I can’t tell you how many things she has talked me into in our time together here. So here I am, and actually very glad of it. She did tell me the other day that “no good sermon has ever been longer than 10 minutes!”
We added this Service of Remembrance to the Sunday morning of reunions when Ann and I came to St. Lawrence in 1996. How could we let this great gathering of Laurentian alumni pass without pausing to remember those who can’t be with us again—friends, members of our classes who helped shape who we have become, in many cases also people who have helped shape St. Lawrence over the years by their commitments of time, resources and wisdom? The answer is we can’t, and so here we are and it is right.
Kathleen also asked me last week what readings she should include in the service to set the context for my sermon. Often, she said, those readings are passages from the Bible. I said that I don’t really know any passages from the Bible, but then I recalled how many times I have used the passages you heard today from Matthew and Ecclesiastes to lead into one of the most important messages I think must guide our approach to education—and particularly higher education—in America today.
Matthew 13:12—“For whosoever hath to him shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that which he hath."—articulates what economists call the “principle of cumulative advantage”—the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. Ecclesiastes 9:11—"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all."—extends the insight: even when it would be just for the swift, the strong, the wise, the understanding and the skilled to be rewarded, “time and chance” interfere.
I think that if time and chance were the only things interfering with justice, we could live with that—stuff happens, we all know. But the principle of cumulative advantage’s other side is, of course, the principle of cumulative disadvantage—once a person or group falls behind they have less and less access to the resources necessary to compete—to catch up—and so they fall further behind even when they are swift, strong, wise, understanding or skilled.
The genius of America has been our simultaneous belief in freedom and equality and our willingness to grapple openly, if not always successfully, with the tensions between those two values. By freedom we mean primarily political and economic freedom. A just society is one in which citizens are stakeholders in the political process, have agency and influence over the ways their lives will be governed and organized, are free from unreasonable laws and are free, within limits they have helped to define, to live their lives as they wish. A just society, we also believe, is also one in which its members are free to pursue their economic self-interest, benefit from the rewards of their labor and their investments, and choose how to use the benefits of their labor and investments—even when the resources they have for investment did not all come from their own labor or because they themselves were swift, strong, wise, understanding or skilled.
At the same time, we believe in equality—equality before the law, equal access to the benefits of our freedom, and so on. We are uncomfortable with inequality, at least when it is not the result of being slow, weak, unwise, non-understanding or un-skilled.
We are uncomfortable with what might be called unjust inequality because it conflicts with our values—who we are as Americans—we are uncomfortable with it because too much inequality leads to political instability in a democratic society, and we are uncomfortable with it because it is not in our self-interest to miss out on the greater national productivity that would result if all could contribute at the level of their capacity. These values are in tension because we know that maximum freedom leads to maximum inequality, and maximum equality results in minimal freedom because our experience is that absolute equality can only happen as the result or force and constraint. American political and social life has always been about finding a balance that we are prepared to accept and live with, and that balance has moved at different times in our history in one direction or the other toward more freedom or toward more equality.
Now there can be and are quibbles with all of this. As Garry Wills showed so brilliantly in Lincoln at Gettysburg, one of the five best books I have ever read, the so-called “American Creed” that we can all recite, intoning our commitments to freedom and equality when asked by outsiders what Americans believe—our founding myth—was really created by Lincoln at Gettysburg—it was not just “always there” for us and it is by no means completely there for us now. We all know how far from any sort of reasonable equality we were then and how long it has taken since to move closer to some reasonable level of equality. Throughout our history we have, as a nation, tended in my view to err on the side of more freedom.
What Lincoln did at Gettysburg, Wills argues, was . . . . . cleanse the Constitution . . . . . . [by altering] the document from within, by appeal from its letter to the spirit . . .
You know by heart, I’m sure, Lincoln’s opening sentence: Four score and seven years ago [the year of the Declaration of Independence, not the completion of the Constitution] our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation [the nation was founded in 1776, in Lincoln’s view; the state, and the Constitution that implemented it and determined how it would be governed, came later], conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
The spirit of the nation, its soul and central value system, implied Lincoln, is in the Declaration of Independence. The Constitution was the imperfect organizing document of the government—the state— that would henceforth manage the nation conceived in the Declaration. Wills said: . . . . [Lincoln] performed one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting. Everyone in that vast throng of thousands was having his or her intellectual pocket picked. The crowd departed with a new thing in its ideological luggage, that new Constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they brought there with them. They walked off, from those curving graves on the hillside, under a changed sky, into a different America. Lincoln had revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely.
The necessity of this Lincolnesque sleight of hand is an illustration of how we have been more forceful about equality in the American Creed than we have been in practice.
That too much inequality can threaten the stability of democratic governments was clear to the founders, as one can see in the arguments back and forth on this issue in the Federalist Papers and the Adams-Jefferson correspondence, and it has been verified in decades of empirical research in political sociology. American democracy has worked, this research shows, because there has been enough intergenerational socioeconomic mobility so that those at the bottom of the income and wealth distribution have hope that their children will be able to move up if they are swift, strong, wise, understanding or skilled. The high level of mobility in America historically meant that even those at the bottom could rationally commit to living within the rules—they felt they had a stake in America.
But intergenerational socioeconomic mobility has slowed in America, and we now have what looks like a permanent underclass of people whose children do not and will not escape their place at the bottom of our system. When I was a graduate student in sociology at Columbia in the late 1960’s, Columbia scholars were leaders in the study of social mobility. At that time America ranked approximately 33rd among industrial societies worldwide in its level of social and economic inequality. Today we have the most economic inequality of any advanced society in the world—more than in all of the hereditary monarchies we have opposed, sometimes through warfare, in our nation’s history!
This is not right; it conflicts with our values; but it is also not in our economic and political self-interest. In America today high-achieving students from low-income families still have no more chance of graduating from college than do low-achievers from high-income families. That is a real crisis, and it is a national disgrace. As a nation, we are failing to get anywhere near enough of the best students from low-income families motivated and able to afford to attend college.
One of the ways in which I am most proud of St. Lawrence historically and in my time here is our stubborn commitment to doing at least our share, and sometimes more than our share, of educating students from low-income families. A member of the Class of 1955—a physician who grew up in Ogdensburg—said to me at the reception we hosted at MacAllaster House for his class at his fiftieth reunion four years ago: “Those of us growing up in the North Country called St. Lawrence the ‘University of Opportunity,’” and he thanked me for our continued commitment to opportunity. Eighty percent of St. Lawrence students today receive university funded, need-based financial aid. Twenty percent of St. Lawrence students today are the recipients of federal Pell Grants which go to students from families in the lowest quartile of family incomes in America.
Before the current recession St. Lawrence’s endowment was roughly $250 million. Williams, with an endowment of almost $1.5 billion in 2006, had 10.6% of its students receiving Pell Grants; Middlebury: $800 million endowment, 9.4% Pell recipients; Pomona $1.5 billion endowment, 10.2% Pell recipients; Swarthmore: $1.4 billion endowment, 12.3% Pell recipients.
Forty-one percent of Williams’ students received institutionally funded need-based financial aid in 2006, 36% for Middlebury, 57% for Pomona, and 53% for Swarthmore. St. Lawrence’s institutionally funded student grant aid budget was $7.5 million higher than Williams’ in 2006, on an enrollment-adjusted basis, $5.4 million higher than Middlebury’s, $3.9 million higher than Pomona’s, and $4.8 million higher than Swarthmore’s. St. Lawrence students who have received financial aid graduate with more debt than students from these colleges, but they graduate at the same high rate as students who do not receive financial aid.
The reality is that the wealthiest private colleges and universities in America—those who can most afford it—educate the lowest percentages of the nation’s low-income students, and state and federal policies governing how public colleges and universities are funded also do not, despite what one might naturally think, help to counteract the now-deeply-embedded inequality of opportunity we have in America. In New York State, the average family income of students attending SUNY institutions is more than $4,000 higher than the average family income of students attending private colleges and universities, and the average family income of students attending CUNY institutions is the same as the average family income of students attending private colleges and universities.
All of this must change if we are to find a better balance in America between freedom and equality, if we are to ensure the stability of our democracy, and if we are, in our own self-interest, to maximize the human capital we can apply to the production of economic prosperity for ourselves and our children.
In a few moments you will hear the names of St. Lawrence alumni who have died in the last year. For them, St. Lawrence was the University of Opportunity; for hundreds of us here on campus for this reunion, St. Lawrence was the University of Opportunity and we are what we have become because of it. We owe it to our fallen classmates, and to ourselves, to ensure that this marvelous university that we love will continue to be a place of genuine opportunity forever. Thank you.
